Monica’s apartment building was distinctive, which may have been why I’d recognized it right away when it showed up on New York One.
It’s on Jane Street in the northwest corner of the Village, a seventeen-story Art Deco building with a facade of yellow-brown brick, and elab-136
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orately sculpted lintels and cornices. We walked uptown on Hudson Street without saying much, and when Monica’s building, taller than its neighbors, hove into view, Elaine’s hand tightened its grip on mine.
By the time we were across the street from it she was crying.
She said, “If she ever did a bad thing I never knew it. She was never mean-spirited, she never hurt anybody. Never. She fucked some married men, big fucking deal, and she quit working once her parents died and left her enough money to live on. And sometimes she’d keep candy in her purse and eat it secretly, because she was ashamed and didn’t want you to know. And she probably gave more thought to her wardrobe than Mother Teresa ever did, which probably made her a more superficial person than Mother Teresa, and a lot more fun to hang out with. And those are the worst things I can think of to say about her, and they’re not so terrible, are they? They’re not bad enough to get you killed. Are they?”
“No.”
“I can’t look at her building. It makes me cry.”
“I’ll get us a cab.”
“No, let’s walk for a while. Can we walk for a while?” We walked north on Hudson, which becomes Ninth Avenue north of Fourteenth Street. We passed a trendy restaurant called Markt, and she said, “Rene Magritte wasn’t French, he was Belgian.”
“But you still knew he was the painter Sussman was talking about.”
“Because I got the same image in my mind, that surreal dissonance.
It’s daytime but the sky’s dark. Or that one with a picture of a pipe with a curved stem, and writing that says ‘This is not a pipe.’ Paradox.
The reason I just thought of it now—”
“Is that Markt is a Belgian restaurant.”
“Yeah, and so’s the little place across the street on Fourteenth, La Petite Something-or-other. Monica liked it, they’ve got all these different ways to cook mussels, and she was always crazy about mussels. You know what they look like?”
“Mussels? Sort of like clams.”
“Up close,” she said, “after you take them out of the shell. They look like pussies.”
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“Oh.”
“I told her it was her latent lesbianism shining through. We were going to have lunch there but we never got around to it. And now we never will.”
“You haven’t had anything to eat today,” I said.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Not there,” I agreed. “But should we stop someplace?”
“I couldn’t eat.”
“Okay.”
“It wouldn’t stay down. But if you’re hungry . . .”
“I’m not.”
“Well, if you decide you want something, we can stop. But I’ve got no appetite.”
We walked a few blocks in silence, and then she said, “People die all the time.”
“Yes.”
“It’s what happens. The longer you live the more people you lose.
That’s how the world works.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I may be a little nuts for the next few days.”
“That’s okay.”
“Or longer. I wasn’t ready for this.”
“No.”
“How could I be? I figured I’d always have her. I figured we’d be cranky old ladies together. She’s the only friend I have who knows I used to turn tricks. I just got the tenses wrong, didn’t I? She was the only friend I had who knew I used to turn tricks. She’s in the past tense now, isn’t she? She’s part of the past, she’s gone forever from the present and the future. I think I have to sit down.” There was a Latino coffee shop handy. They had Cuban sandwiches and I don’t know what else, because neither of us looked at the menu. I ordered two coffees, and she told the waiter to make hers a cup of tea.
